Messy Kitchen

Messy Kitchen, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

Slow and steady...it may not win the race, but it's the only way we're getting anything done around here right now. Slow, as in we're still unpacking boxes and steady, as in hey! we're still unpacking boxes.

Above is a shot of the kitchen. We don't have actual counters (painted plywood for now), no backsplash and no drawer pulls yet. But we have top-notch appliances we bought for pennies on the dollar on eBay and Craigslist, enough space for everyone to be in there and we can pull off some pretty fabulous meals. The cool chicks at Urban Farmhouse have counters in the shop that are made of sheet metal, distressed to make them look like aging zinc and then sealed--they gave me the name of their sheet metal contractor today, and I think we'll probably end up doing the same for our counters. (If you ever get to Salinas and are looking truly unique items at an affordable price, this is the place.)


To the right of where I was standing when I shot the above, there's this:



Rest of the kitchen, the double ovens, the baking area, and then down the little hallway is the laundry room and a storage area. If I ever get it together, our earthquake or zombie apocalypse supplies will go into the storage area. I keep thinking, "Ack, if shit goes down (earthquake or zombies) we are so unprepared."

More pictures tomorrow. Shooting the corners of the house, posting them all ... happy Sunday. Laundry, baseball and maybe some roasted tomato soup and homemade focaccia for dinner.

Random Act of Journalism

So a few weeks back, I wrote about the house for the Monterey County Weekly, where I'm the editor. A friend suggested wryly on Facebook that the story was a result of either an "egomaniacal editor, or a slow news week." In reality, it was time for our annual home and garden cover feature, it was my turn do to a cover piece and it's sometimes good to write what you know. Not that the egomaniacal part isn't correct. Being unsure of yourself is not a quality you can possess when you edit a newspaper.

Blogger, for some reason, won't embed the link. I'll copy and paste the whole thing at the bottom of the post.

This story prompted one city planning department employee to ask— out loud, mind you, and not as part of any internal or existential dialogue— "I don't know if I should be mad about this story or not." My theory is, if you have to ask the question about whether or not something should piss you off, then the answer is no. With a sharp blow to the head. Believe me, when I piss you off intentionally, you'll know it.

Housewise, there's more movement than before. We hosted a friend's birthday party last Sunday, which required us to get our acts together, clean a bunch, put a bunch away and socialize. But then the floor guy came on Saturday and started sanding the first floor, which means everything is all torn up and dusty again. He put the first coat on the living room and hallway, and it's lovely. Tomorrow he finishes the kitchen and I think, although I'm not sure, he may do the dining room as well. Next weekend, we start the great push to turn the front yard into a micro-farm. That should piss the city off too.

How renovating a house was as much about building tension as building a home.

By Mary Duan Thursday, April 7, 2011

How long into a renovation project is it reasonable to begin fantasizing about taking a hit out on your contractor? And by fantasy, I mean talking to a friend who happens to be a criminal defense attorney about the mechanics of actually taking out a hit on my contractor.

“No no, I really want to know. What are the chances of getting caught?” I prod my friend over coffee at the Cherry Bean in Old Town. “I mean, where in Salinas does one even go to hire a hit man?”

“We are not having this conversation,” he says flicking an imperceptible piece of lint from the collar of a very nice dark blue suit. “But if you get caught, remember to keep your mouth shut and invoke your right to counsel immediately. And then call me.”

He knows, and I know (and any law enforcement types who happen to be reading this should know) that I have no intention of actually killing anyone, or hiring anyone to do it for me.

But on Jan. 5, the desire was certainly there.

That’s the day that I realized I was fully caught up in the home rehab vortex.

It’s a place where actual time has no meaning, a bizarro land in which our contractor and the fire sprinkler subcontractor had so antagonized each other that the sprinkler company slapped a lien on the house – conditional lien release notwithstanding – and the contractor, in turn, threatened to sue them. It’s the day the architect hired by the contractor had metaphorically raised his middle finger to my husband and me from the safety of his office 157 miles away in Santa Rosa, saying, “I don’t work for you, I work for your contractor.”

It’s also the very same day a building inspector from the city of Salinas, a man known around town as “Red Tag Dave,” came full bore into my life.

If you’ve driven through Old Town any time in the past 121 years, you’ve probably seen the house. It’s the stupidly large Queen Anne next door to the mortuary, the three-story monster with 13 separate kinds of architectural gingerbread work, a turret and (strange in landlocked Salinas) a widow’s walk on the roof. Depending on which decade of rumor you’re listening to, the house has been a whorehouse, a halfway house, a flophouse, a meth house or a crash house where bored teenagers used to break in, break windows and banisters, get drunk and have sex.

One of those rumors is true. Based on the number of broken windows and banisters that had to be replaced, and the number of beer bottles we had to recycle when my husband and I bought it in February 2010, there has been nothing much else for the 13 – to 19-year-old set to do in South Salinas for the past three years other than break stuff, drink and fool around in the sad wreck of a vacant Victorian on Pajaro Street.

It wasn’t always sad, and it wasn’t always vacant. For 109 of the last 121 years, it had been a home owned only by two families: The Iversons, who built it in 1890, and the Rudolphs, who bought it from the Iversons in 1896.

In 1999, Diana Rudolph, the widow of Rudolph grandson Bertram Rudolph, looked around. She and her husband had raised their children in that house. But they were grown and gone, and so was he. She didn’t need that much space anymore, and Bertram had left her a wealthy woman; she sold the place for $240,000 to local real estate developer Eddie DeCarli.

Remembering the Salinas Valley real estate market of the late ’90s and early aughts is to recall the start of the insanity. Salinas rapidly became a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Housing prices soared, business was good all over and DeCarli, by all accounts a smart businessman, bought the house as a side project with plans to turn it into office suites for attorneys or accountants.

He gave it a new roof, installed new rough plumbing, jacked it up and poured a new foundation. Workers gutted the inside to the studs, installed cabling for high-speed, Cat 5 ethernet – and tore out everything that made the place a Victorian. A 7-foot, hand-made copper bathtub was tossed to the curb. Hand-carved fireplace mantles were torn out. The pocket doors that separated some of the downstairs rooms also were tossed. (I’m told a guy named Mike has those. Mike, if you’re reading this, call me.)

Then in 2007, with the interior still gutted and the project incomplete, the dominoes began to fall. The bubble burst, and work on the house and several other projects DeCarli had going came to a complete halt; DeCarli, I’m told, used to spend long hours standing outside the house, smoking and staring.

“It was an ocean of pain,” says someone who watched it happen. “I’ve never seen anything so sad.”

The keys went back to the bank in 2008.

It’s discomfiting, knowing the way you’re trying to live your life has been born directly from someone else’s despair. But before we could wrap our arms around buying a house out of foreclosure, we had to wrap our minds around getting out of Berkeley.

We moved our family of four from Salinas to the East Bay in the summer of 2008, lured by a great tech job for my geek husband and the potential of a more lively atmosphere for the family. We bought a tiny, overpriced house in North Berkeley (home to the “North Berkeley Entitled Elite,” as my Stanford Ph.D. neighbor wryly quipped in his British-Indian accent) and tried to settle in.

A year later: Chuck and I pay an Oakland business called “The Rat Patrol” $500 to deal with an overwhelming rodent infestation. Tales of drug dealing, theft, fights and weapons at Berkeley High became routine dinner conversation. I nearly get run over every time I step out of my house (hey Berkeley drivers – you suck!). Don’t get me started on the needle exchange truck parked outside the entrance to my youngest’s summer camp. I look at Chuck one August night as we sit in our rat-tastic house three blocks from Chez Panisse, and say, “Not one more minute. I won’t stay here, not one more minute. Take me back to Salinas.”

Berkeley had rubbed off on us a little bit, though. Going into house hunting, we wanted two things – a walkable neighborhood close to things (coffee, movies, groceries), and enough space to raise a few chickens and grow our own vegetables. In Berkeley, urban chickens are nearly a requirement of home ownership.

But finding a house even while millions of people frantically mailed their keys back to various banks proved a challenge. We lost out on two places in rapid succession, our VA-guaranteed loan trumped by all – or mostly cash offers. Chuck was driving down Pajaro Street when he got the news about the last one, a mid-century marvel on a cul de sac near Hartnell College with a brick-hearth fireplace in the kitchen, a wood-paneled bar and rec room a la Mad Men in the basement and a neighbor with, gasp, chickens. Chuck saw the enormous “available” sign from Pacific Valley Bank in front of the Victorian, figured “Why not?” and headed to the bank.

Ben Tinkey, then PVB’s president, looked at Chuck for a long minute when he asked about the house. He reached into his desk, pulled out a key, handed it over and said, “Go take a look and see what you’re getting yourself into.”

As Chuck says now, a fine covering of drywall dust powdering everything we own, “When we decided to do this, I asked the wrong question. I asked ‘Can we do this?’ I should have asked, ‘How hard will it be?’”

“Why is the architect in Santa Rosa?” someone asked me. “They have perfectly good architects here.”

It’s true, they do. But the architect is in Santa Rosa because our contractor is in Santa Rosa. And the contractor is in Santa Rosa for a few reasons: We were working on such a severely restricted budget that I couldn’t get anyone local to take me seriously, and…

We were working on such a severely restricted budget that I couldn’t get anyone local to take me seriously.

What we were getting into was a wholesale rehab of the gutted interior DeCarli left behind, with our only means of financing it an FHA Section 203(k) loan. The (k) is vehicle of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that allows a borrower to take a percentage of the loan amount to fund fixing up the house. With the loan comes the need for a contractor who can deal with the small mountain of paperwork the FHA requires – and a contractor with enough liquidity to wait patiently to get paid. Because after the city signs off on a section of work, the FHA has to sign off as well. No signatures, no cash, and the money is doled out in stingy increments.

That’s where Contractor Al and his sidekick, Architect Josh, come in.

We closed on the house in February 2010 and submitted our plans on March 13. On April 16, I started calling the Salinas Planning Department just about every day. On May 4, we got our permit to work on the 700-square-foot basement apartment. And on June 15, we moved in to that basement – me, my husband, two hormonal teenage boys who tower over me and love to wrestle with each other and a smelly, aging Jack Russell mix with an ever-worsening gastric disorder.

In the basement we stayed, until about three weeks ago. We moved into the big house during the worst cold snap in decades, and did it without having a working furnace.

The cataclysm of events that brought Architect Josh, Contractor Al, Red Tag Dave and us together built slowly over the last six months of 2010. Yeah, Josh technically was subcontracted by Al, but Al was relying on us (hamstrung budget, remember) to deal with a lot of local paperwork. The architect would do little things, like completely fail to address something the city required after a first round of comments – for example the location of the sewer hookups. When we pointed out to him that his error would cost us three weeks, and that he should expedite the plans at no cost to us, he said simply, “My contract isn’t with you, it’s with [Al] and will be billed accordingly.”

By January we’ve hired a separate crew to replace the Swiss-cheese roof on the garage, which looks like a set straight out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only with fewer cannibals. The work has been included on the plans; we know this, because we told Josh, “Hey, put the garage on the plans.”

Red Tag Dave arrives to do a screw inspection. (Consider the irony.) He sees the crew working on the garage and says, in essence, “Hey, what are they doing? You don’t have a permit for that.” But of course we do, we counter. Josh put it on the plans, because we told him to.

Sure enough, it’s not on the plans.

The inspector comes back the next morning and gives us 24 hours to pull a garage permit or the entire project – fixing the house we are desperately trying to move into – will be shut down. I can’t fault Red Tag Dave, because he’s doing the job the city has hired him to do – keeping people from getting away with substandard shit. But panic sets in.

Al rounds up his drywall crew with the rallying cry, “We’re out of here!” – because surely there is no way we can rectify this in a day. Chuck reminds him that Josh was supposed to take care of this. He uses the word idiot, he uses the word schedule. Al shrugs his little shrug, and the team goes back to work.

And then Chuck picks up the phone, calls the planning department, starts working on the garage permit and negotiates a truce.

I’m an architecture junkie. The best Christmas gift I received last year was a LEGO architecture kit. It came with an 800-piece set of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Pennsylvania masterpiece Fallingwater.

It will take hours to put together. Once I’m done, I’m going to put it on a shelf in the library and attach a little red tag to its facade.

And then Chuck and I will go outside and start work on our urban chicken coop. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue once told me it will be easier to open a medical marijuana shop in the city than it will be to convince the council to pass an ordinance allowing chickens in Old Town.

Our relationship with our contractor appears short-lived at this point – the rehab money is almost gone and what’s left on the interior is all cosmetic. Contractor Al even reached detente with the fire sprinkler folks, and the lien went away.

But Red Tag Dave and me?

Given the fact that we don’t yet have a final permit for the house, he and I have a long and egg-filled future ahead of us.

Shower Dreams

I used to write about architects and architecture fairly regularly when I covered land use and development issues for various pubs. (That was before I decided I wanted to kick our architect in the shins again and again and again ...) I'm still an architecture junkie though. I grew up in an architecturally significant city, we take vacations based on fabulous architecture ... hell, I even have the 800-plus piece Lego version of Fallingwater waiting to be built and red tagged.

Of the architects I've interviewed, my favorite was probably the late John Thodos, of Thodos AIA in Carmel-by-the-Sea. I wrote about the second home he designed and built in Carmel--the first was on the ocean and after he and his wife lived there for a time, they sold for it for an egregious amount of money and designed and built something smaller and a few blocks up from the water.

In any case, one of the best features about the Thodos' second home was the "wet room" that served as the master bath. Everything was tiled, there was no shower curtain, just a drain. "Cleaning up," John told me, "should be a pleasure. Bathing should be a pleasure." And when Chuck finishes tiling this room, and I never, ever have to see or speak to our contractor again (not that he ever responds to my emails) and the hot water heater is functional, I fully believe that cleaning up in this room will be a pleasure. (As an aside, Chuck says our contractor has really been quite fine in his dealings with us. I think Chuck is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, with a side of Tile Fatigue.)

The Superbowl of Tile, Part 2
Originally uploaded by Mary Duan

During a break in the tiling action, when Chuck was slumped on the couch, he said to me, "You know, when we decided to do this, I asked the wrong question. I asked 'Can we do this?' I should have asked, 'How hard will it be to do this?'" As for me? I've come to the conclusion that the FHA 203K program is a program that can be gamed, only the home owners aren't the ones doing the gaming. And anyone who tries to do a major project in the city of Salinas more than once is an idiot. Call me "Exhibit A."

In the rest of the house, everything is painted. We went with Behr's "Frost" for the walls, and Behr's "Rocky Mountain Sky" for the master bath, the boy's bath, the half-bath downstairs, the studio apartment bath and the laundry room. (I'd link to the actual colors, but the Behr website is a pain in the ass.) We need to get the gas turned on in the main house, all of the outlets have to be wired and the floors are kind of a disaster, but we're planning on moving in to the top floor in the next two weeks or so. Our contractor will show up again when we are ready for the finish work to happen--and when I say finish, I mean, when he's ready to finish.

I've had a few people ask me, without really asking me, how we're affording this. I refer them to the economic collapse of 2008 that resulted in this house being completely gutted and never being finished, it reverting back to the bank in a foreclosure and the bank being desperate to get the loan off of their books. Chuck's also a geek and he paid attention in math class; between his full-time job and the house, he's also working his ass off, harder than any person I've seen.

More pictures here. And greetings to my readers from Raleigh, NC. That's kind of near Cary, isn't it?

Two words: proxy server.

Seeing Red

Here is a picture of a cement ball. This cement ball was one of my Christmas gifts from my husband, who bought it after I suggested that I had fallen hard for a cement ball at Urban Farmhouse in Oldtown Salinas. I love this cement ball and it is going into my garden, when I have a garden. Looking at this cement ball makes me happy.



Here is a not terribly comprehensive list of things currently making me unhappy: our idiot architect; our contractor; architects in general; the city of Salinas building department; contractors in general; famous architects of the 20th Century; building inspectors; anyone threatening to red tag our project; and, oh yeah, our idiot architect.

If he didn't live three hours away, I would drive to his house and kick him in the shins. You might remember him from previous posts. He's the one who told Chuck he didn't work for us, he works for our contractor and only takes direction from him.

This week, we find ourselves at the point of screw inspection. (Consider the irony.) The drywall is up, the screws are in place, the inspector was scheduled to come out and inspect the screws so Al and the all-Oaxacan construction team could commence taping and texturing.

Here is a picture of the drywall, pre-screw inspection.



Simultaneous to preparing for the screw inspection, our friend Grady was gathering his own team so they could come and shore up the garage. Built around 1900, the garage features a chimney, a canning room, a swiss cheese roof and feral cats. It looks like something from "The Road," albeit with fewer cannibals. The garage was to have been included in the plans. The plans the architect drew. Because Chuck told him, the garage needs to be included in the plans.

The inspector shows up yesterday to inspect the screws, sees Grady and the gang working on the garage and says something along the lines of, "What the fuck are they doing? You don't have a permit for the garage." Au contraire, says Chuck; it is on the plans, because I told the architect to put it there.

You can likely figure out the rest. It's not on the plans. Inspector comes back this morning and says, "It's not on the plans. You have until 4 p.m. to start the process of getting a separate permit for the garage or I am red-tagging the entire project." Upon hearing this, our contractor rounds up his crew and says, "Ok boys, we are OUT OF HERE for the rest of the week." Because Chuck surely isn't capable of getting the permit issue dealt with in four or five hours.

Oh yes he is. Yes. He. Is. Ten minutes later, he has a response from another guy in the Building Department (I guess I can't hate all of them) telling him what he has to do. The building guy tells him the email exchange officially launches the garage permit process and there will be no red tagging. The inspector comes back and signs off on the drywall screws, and that will be the last inspection on the house until the final. Contractor starts kvetching about starting work on the garage prematurely until Chuck, undoubtedly using the voice I like to think of as ex-Navy officer, tells him: "The screw inspection was supposed to happen three days ago, and the garage was supposed to be included on the plans by your idiot architect. Had you been on time, and had the architect done his job, none of this would have happened."

Chuck needs a drink. I need this project to be done.

My other Christmas present was the Lego architecture kit, which includes an 800-plus piece set of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. (I'm an architecture junkie.)

Once I finish building it, I am going to put it on a shelf in the library, and attach a little red tag to it.

Drywall, Baby

Yeah, ok. Get off my back. I'm the den mother on a pirate ship and time for pleasure writing comes infrequently.

Here's what's going on with the house. We got the final permit. After being told by the city of Salinas that we had to jump through a number of ridiculous hoops, including sheer-walling the entire structure with a rare type of plywood available only three days a year in a jungle in Borneo, obtaining a letter from the owners who lost the place to foreclosure testifying to the fact that the existing sheer-wall had been installed correctly and then sacrificing a virgin up on the widow's walk (but only when the moon was full) we would be good to go.

Al and the All-Oaxacan Construction Team has been here for two weeks now, and finally, finally, progress is being made. They have insulated everything, there is drywall going up and the electrical is mostly being finalized. We drove to this very shady granite place on Saturday at the port of Oakland and picked out our slab. (How you know you've married the right person? You see a slab, he sees a slab, you both go "oooh" and it's the same slab. While we lack fixtures, we are having Christmas dinner here. If you're reading this and you're a) a relative to whom I'm actually still speaking or b) a friend lacking family nearby, you are welcome to come here. It's slightly less white trash than it used to be.

Pictures soon. I have to find the damn camera cords yet again.

You Can't Kill the Rooster

To paraphrase David Sedaris, when shit (like a snail-slow architect who shows you nothing but disdain and a schadenfreude-ridden city building department that loves not giving you a building permit) brings you down, sometimes you just gotta say "fuck it" and sand yourself some motherfucking floors.

(The swearing quotient on this blog is about to go up. As of Oct. 27, I will no longer be working for the American City Business Journals chain, where I was once pulled into my editor's office and scolded for calling Pat Robertson a douchebag on Twitter after this guy read the tweet and ratted me out. I'm not sure what the "E" in his name stands for. I'm thinking "exceedingly earnest." Just so we're clear: anyone who says that Haiti got what it deserved when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit because the country once "made a pact with the devil" is a douchebag. And a journalist who rats out another journalist for saying so? Well I guess he's just a company man.)

But I digress.

About ten days ago we got the comments back on our second building plan submittal. There was a list of 30 things that needed to be re-done on the plans before we could resubmit. I'd say about 70 percent of this falls squarely on the building department, because they were decidedly unclear when they gave comments on the first round. But the other 30 percent, I'm laying at the feet of the architect. There were things that should have been done on the second round that he knew about, that were spelled out and that he still didn't do.

Chuck emails him and says the following: "Since these comments were all there the first round and you did not address them properly, I expect you to make the changes and overnight the plans to me at no cost."

The architect shoots back this: "As for my fees, my contract is with (the contractor) and they will be billed in accordance with my contract with them."

And this is the point where Chuck loses his mind. Because Chuck? He's the guy who does his job. And right now? Everyone else is pretty much the other guy.

As a result of us still not having a permit for the main house, it's safe to say Thanksgiving is fucked. I'm hoping that Christmas is not fucked as well. But having a new job at a paper where journalism still means something is reason to celebrate and damnit, I want to have people over for a soup party before I start.

We got some of our furniture out of storage and set up the dining room. Hung some lights, hung some art and polished up the dining room table, but the floor looks like hell. Underneath layers of grime and some type of paper-backing (because at some point apparently some idiot thought it would be a good idea to lay down linoleum on top of the pristine, clear redwood planking), there is beauty to be found. But it's going to take more than a wet mop to make it happen.

So yesterday, we rented a sander.

(to be continued ...)

A Tempest in a Long Island Iced Tea Pot

I'm taking this post off the beaten track. But before I do, a quick update.

Yes, I still want to kill our architect, or at least kick him in the shins until he cries like a little girl. He neglected to put something on the second round of plans the city told him he needed after the first round; when Chuck told him he needed to get his act together, put a rush on it and that we wouldn't be paying for him to correct his own mistakes, he responded: "I don't work for you, I work for your contractor."

Oh yes he did.

Here's the thing: the city, the architect, the civil engineer and even Al the Contractor seem to exist in this alternate universe where time has no real meaning. What should take a week in the real world takes three weeks in Bizarro Building World. Chuck and I, on the other hand, live in Deadline World. He writes and implements code. If his code isn't perfect and the implementation flawless, portions of a Fortune 100 company stop functioning. I write news. If I don't, I lose my job.

Which leads me to the point of today's post, construction, the Blue Goose Bar & Grill and the Montessori Learning Center. Our youngest son is a student at Montessori. He's a 7th grader, a foot-and-a-half taller than his teacher, he's rocking the beginnings of a mustache and I know for certain he is the only student who walks to and from school. Shrug. When he lived in Berkeley, he took BART by himself and that was almost two years ago.

Montessori is kind of special snowflake land, but it works for us and has for 11 years. Both boys are Montessori kids.

The Montessori building, along with a former restaurant around the corner, are owned by the same guy, Chris Evans. I wouldn't know him if he stepped out in front of my Mini as I went screaming out of the parking lot at a high rate of speed. I don't know if he's a good guy, a bad guy or a neutral guy. No clue. But I know he is trying to open a new restaurant around the corner from the school and this means one thing for certain: he's got a masochistic streak a mile wide. Anyone who tries to get anything done in the city has a masochistic streak, but it's especially true if you're going into the food business.

Evans and his partners (I guy I do know and like quite a bit, Todd Fisher) are seeking a full liquor license for the place, which shares a parking lot with Montessori. The school is freaked out because they have visions of Blue Goose customers running down the little Sams and McKenzies and Ashleys and McKennas at Montessori. The Blue Goose is freaked out because they've already invested a shitload of money in trying to get this place open (tip: never, ever buy your equipment first) and Montessori is standing directly between the restaurant and those 300 percent markups on liquor sales.

The local newspapers have gone out of their way to get the story wrong, or at least forgotten a small thing like fact checking. The students aren't gone by 3 p.m., for example. Evans may have put $1 million into tenant improvements of the Montessori building, but that comes back to him in a little thing called rent, as another example. And neither story noted the stop work/permit violation notice plastered to the future Blue Goose door. For more on that, read on.

The school had to battle to get a restriction placed on the liquor license that says no hard liquor sales until 5:30 p.m. And don't let anyone fool you--it was a battle. I seriously doubt any of our kids are going to get run over by a produce salesman on an afternoon bender, and Chuck thinks this is mostly a tempest in a tea pot. But given that Evans already has a stop work/permit violation notice on his door, a sign he's willing to ignore the law when it suits him, I feel better having the restriction in writing. He owns both buildings, he has a right to run a business and the school has the right, in accordance to its lease and generally accepted practices of running a school, to keep its students alive.

It could be a win-win situation. With booze.

The way the city works, though, the poor shmoes might never get open. But if they do, I plan on being there on opening day, ordering one of Todd's burgers and a martini.

But only after 5:30 p.m.

Sometimes You've Just Got to Say, What the Cluck

One of the goals of living in this house is to produce as much of our own food as possible. There's enough space--really more than enough space--for an expansive vegetable garden. (My husband is a canning fiend-how many men do you know who have their own pressure canners and love to use them?) We've planted four citrus trees and four pomegranate bushes already, and have tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and corn going in some temporary raised beds we put in so we could feel like we were making progress while waiting for the permits. Once we move in this weekend, I'm going to clear out the bed that runs along the cinderblock wall separating us from the funeral home next door (yeah, funeral home next door. They held services for John Steinbeck there before his ashes were interred at a local cemetery) and start planting the berry bushes that eventually will cover the wall. I'll start the herbs going as well--I've gotten some good advice from the folks at Rocket Farms. The water department is coming next week to install the new water main, and once that's done we'll start working on the drip irrigation system for the beds that eventually will cover the entire front yard.

And we want chickens. Urban chickens. We got fairly spoiled living around the block from Fred Dodsworth, who along with his wife Linda has a very active egg operation going in their backyard. But urban chickens were no big deal in Berkeley; it wasn't unusual to see one that had escaped from its yard and gone wandering down the street. There were far weirder things to see in Berkeley.

Stress
Originally uploaded by Dave-F

(Photo used with permission under a Creative Commons' license.)

Fresh eggs are out of this world. Nothing compares, at least nothing you can buy in a store. And so it is with a heavy heart that I make the following proclamation: I am about to become an urban chicken outlaw. Because in the city of Salinas, there are no chickens allowed--at least not in my mixed-use neighborhood. (Meth labs? No worries. Illegal car repair shops? They turn a blind eye. Urban chickens? You're a scofflaw.)

I understand completely that noise and smell are concerns. We only have one living neighbor, Mike the Sprinkler guy, with whom we share a fence on the north side of the house. The three houses next to his are all empty and in foreclosure. On our other side is the funeral home, behind us is an alley, and across the alley is one restaurant and a bunch of shops. We're not planning on roosters, and fewer than a half dozen laying hens for eggs, with the coop positioned in the rear yard adjacent to the alley.

It's not a matter of "if you do it right, you can have them" as far as the city is concerned. We're going to seek out a conditional use permit, because I believe in following the process just to amuse myself. We'll lobby the city council, we'll seek the CUP, but in the end, we're probably going to become illegal chicken ranchers.

They're lucky Chuck won't actually let me get a goat.

Reality? Check.

By the time this is over, I'm really going to need sprinklers, because I'm going to need to build a meth lab in the basement to pay for all of it and I don't want a little chemistry accident to burn my house down. That's right, people-I'm breaking bad.

The city of Salinas, the California Water Services Co. and the state of California: I'd like 10 minutes alone in a room with you and a fire hose, because you people have quite the little racket going. Other people ticking me -- pretty much anyone exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen who has ever picked up a hammer, and anyone who lives indoors.

Since the Holy Week Sprinkler Debacle began, I have gotten conflicting messages from everyone. The fire marshal said the Redevelopment Agency told us we would need sprinklers; they most definitely did not. Someone telling you your project requires sprinklers is not something you just forget or blow off. Because had they said it, it would have been included in the scope of the work that defined the budget--the one the contractor drew up, the one the FHA consultant approved. The Fire Marshal told me to call the Water Company and request a flow test to determine whether or not we needed a new meter (kaching! that's another high four figure outlay!) and the Water Company guy laughed at me and said, you need a fire protection company for that! (And he said it with a "duh" in his tone. Nothing ticks me off more than someone giving me a "duh" tone. I've got teenage sons for that--I don't need it from a professional in the course of doing his work.)

So we started calling the fire protection folks last week. We plan on getting bids from three companies. What I've found so far is that they base their bids on the number of sprinkler heads required--one guy told me he averages $210 per sprinkler head, and another told me he averages $150 per head. The $210 guy gave a quote of $8,700, I need someone closer to $5,000. (He also said we needed 11 heads in the basement apartment--a space that is only about 700 square feet.) Nobody can give me an accurate quote until our architect (the only one involved in this I don't want to kill quite yet) sends the correct plans showing the side cuts and the lighting plan.

Why I want to take a fire hose to the state of California is mixed into the middle of all of this. A half dozen people so far have told me that installing a sprinkler system is something a drunk monkey can do. A friend whose husband is an undercover narc told me he spent his teenage years installing systems for his dad, a residential developer, and that her husband offered to show us how to do it in an afternoon.

The problem is that under state code, you can't hire a sprinkler expert to design a system and then do the installation on your own. Whoever designs it installs it. It's possible to find an engineer to design a system, I think, but if they're going to charge $3 or $4k for it, there seems to be no sense in having someone design it and not install it.

This house has been a complete and total blight on Old Town Salinas for more than a half decade. It's been worked on, foreclosed upon, bought, worked on, foreclosed upon, and on and on. It's boarded up and waiting for us to start work. If sprinklers are part of the work, so be it.

I want to get everyone--the planning folks, the fire folks, the FHA folks, the water folks--in one room and give them a message: We are going to do everything right on this to the greatest extent possible. But I am going to move into this house no matter what. The whole "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" doesn't apply here. I'm asking permission until they prove their unwillingness to give it; I am not going to ask for forgiveness. It's really almost time to get out of my way.

Oh Bank of (Redacted), How Thou Dost Vex Me

Part One

Yesterday was not a banner day in our little quest to make this house a home.

Prospect Mortgage sold our loan to a large bank, which while understandable is still is sort of like having an intermediary sell your soul to Satan. We signed documents that had our first three months of payments built into the loan, meaning we don't start paying the mortgage until June 1 (when we anticipate moving in). But the bank in question thinks we're already three weeks late with our first payment.

I got this news via IM from my husband. I'm at work, trying to arrange interviews for stories, he's at work, where his group is undergoing a massive reorg that has him switching from a much beloved boss to a completely unknown entity.

Him: This is weird, I keep getting phone calls from a 1-800 number.
Me: Give me the number.
Him: 1-800-Yada Yada.

I call it, it's Bank of (Redacted).

Me: It's Bank of (Redacted).
Him: Huh, wonder what they want.

Massive fight ensues. Call them back, I say. You call them back, he says. I don't have the information I need to talk to them, I say. You have as much information as I do, he says. Repeat four or five times.

So I call. They want to know where their first payment is. I explain to them that we're not supposed to pay until June. They say, "As if!" (As an aside, it took me 45 minutes to get through to a live human being. The first time they hung up on me, the second time they transferred me into the void, the third time they hung up on me and the fourth time a woman looked up our account, said "You're late," and then told me to talk to whoever originated the loan.)

This is the point at which I felt like vomiting. What if we were wrong? Are we wrong? Did we sign the wrong papers?

Chuck reached out to the folks at Prospect Mortgage and they responded quickly, saying we were right and that they would fix the problem. I tweet to the bank's Help account that help is what I need and get a call from a very sympathetic Sharon about an hour later.

We don't have a resolution yet, but they're working the problem. Apparently the bank was in the middle of processing the payments and just decided to throw the fear of God into us for grins. Or something like that.

Part Two

Not knowing if we had screwed up on our end and were actually late on a payment and wrong about the documents is minor in the general scheme of things, but it added another element of uncertainty to a situation rife with it. Family-wise, we're split up right now, with Chuck and the boys living at his mom's place, and the dog and I living at our friend Todd's place on the opposite end of town. Someone commented to me today to "enjoy the vacation," but I miss being with the kids and I miss my husband snoring. I joined them for dinner the other night and ended up with hives the next day, probably from spending 90 minutes with the cats.

We're waiting for the city right now to either request changes to the plans, or issue a building permit so we can get started. Once we can get started, we're going to do the basement apartment first, because we can at least all live there while the rest of the house is being worked on. It's such a beautiful day today, and is supposed to be for the rest of the weekend, that we're going to work on the yard this afternoon/evening and tomorrow--lots of weeds to slaughter. Orchard Supply Hardware is having a 20 percent off sale on all living things, so we're going to check on their fruit tree situation and may start planting the lemon trees.

I had a personal day today because I need to renew my driver's license, only to discover that today is a state employee furlough day and the DMV offices are closed. I spent hours at the Cherry Bean Coffeehouse (my third place) making work phone calls and going through paperwork, etc. There was a little excitement--a run-by robbery. Guy came in, asked for a cup of water and then grabbed the bills from the tip jar and left.

He then came back an hour later and hung out long enough to be arrested, sans cash, of course. He had spent it on cigarettes.